Penitent 14

Edward held his arm around my waist. He'd been teaching me to ski. He'd only learned how himself, but he picked up things very fast. His family were excellent skiers, darting down the steepest slopes with grace and their usual level of fearlessness.

He held me on the top of one of the more modest peaks. The vista around us was white and vast. He pointed to Alice, obvious to me in the distance with her big red knitted hat bobbing on her head as she whizzed down the mountain in a straight line. "She is stealth," he said. "Her opponent cannot predict where she will strike."

He asked me to guess about Emmett. I guessed correctly when I blurted, "Strength."

"And Rose?" he asked seeming proud.

"She's brave."

"Yes. Courage is her essence. But you said as much. How did you know?"

His hands were joined around me. I leaned my head against his chest. "She has protected me more than once. She doesn't run."

"And Jasper?"

"Leader?"

"Skill," Edward said. Many levels of understanding. But Skill is what he's called."

"And you?" I ask.

"I am a revelation, they used to say. They sang that once."

"Do you remember how it went? Your song?"

He shook his head. "It's no longer in me," he said. "But my self…they called me Wisdom."

"Wisdom. Were you like a sage?"

"No. Not like that. I was with them, not distant, not revered. Just with them. And I was wise. I remember how it was. I was amongst them. I was…a warrior. We all were, all of my family. But we did not fight the way you think. We sparred with might and valor, yes, but with songs, with knowing. With wisdom and courage, with a unity of purpose and thought. We fought with our minds first. Our hands…after."

Emmett's yells sounded over the valley between the two mountains, the one we stood upon, the one they intersected in strong grooved lines.

"So it's not like here?"

"No. It's not. And yet, all of who we are we need. The battle here is raw and primitive. Like life is here. Like love. And that is its splendor, I think. The simple brutality of it. The beauty. It's fragile and here…and gone so quickly it's like a dream."

He untangled his skies from mine then, and I watched him push off. I was behind him, slower and with less grace, but competent enough. My arms were not as strong as they should be, and my legs were weary with the need to slow it down. I needed to be more active. I'd worked hard all of my life, but to be robust and out of doors was never my experience. Rather I was pale and thin, though Edward often told me how the roundness of my breasts and hips captivated him. I did not feel round, not next to these women whose feminine attributes seemed exaggerated, even if their bone structures were small. I only knew the women in church, well robed women, in statues and in person. But these were different, and their modesty was contrived for my benefit.

Until the incident later that day.

It started with an angry wail. A woman's crushed heart captured in gory sound. They gathered, coming from outside and in, twenty of them, hair of all colors, Edward's the most brilliant, the most striking, as if it was the shadow of the very real crown he'd once worn.

She fell before Edward, where he stood on the stairs, me behind him as we'd come running like the others. It was Irina. "He has betrayed me…he has betrayed…," she cried.

"Garret?" Edward asked.

"And Kate," she choked out.

Then, "No, no," she'd wailed, on all fours, head loose on her neck the way it wagged side to side, hanging low. The mood in the room, despair. The others, sick and gasping, dismayed. Sad as it was, how could it affect them like this when they'd seen so much, had fought the fallen ones, how could it leave them murmuring amongst themselves, shielding one another, holding one another, crying breaking out across the room as if it was the worst thing?

"Irina," Edward said taking her hand and lifting her to her knees. Her face…bludgeoned by emotion. "Get up. Stand up, sister."

She looked at him, sniffing, quieting, but not calm. Not at peace, not nearly. But she was gaining something, the ability to stand, when something was ruined, something had died.

Tanya came on one side of her, Athena on the other. They looked so sad, I wondered how they'd console her without coming apart themselves.

Then into the room, like a flurry, another woman, dark-haired Kate, falling in the door, clothing askew, feet bare. On her knees, as if she'd just had the strength to make it. "Find him, get him, he's beneath the ice. He'll die. He'll die!" she screamed to the space of flooring between her hands.

Emmett rushed, Jasper and others. And slowly Edward sat. Feet wide apart. Elbows resting on his knees. Back straight. And the others spread throughout the room and waited. One started to sing, then others, slow music, choppy.

I sat behind Edward, my hand reached for and rested on his shoulder. He did not move to acknowledge me, and still I felt his response, and how I made him strong, even as his legs had softened with his dismay. Irina was embraced by her sisters and they stood before him, eyes closed, as though bereaved.

Kate's sobbing grew softer, then quiet. But she stayed bent, then curled on the floor.

And after a time Jasper and Emmett dragged Garrett in, drenched, tall. He was a long man, wet and limp, face down, long legs dragging past Kate, through the maze of the others, to Edward on the stairs where they laid him like a rug. He did not move.

"He lives, just," Jasper said.

"Is there no song for him?" Kate asked, her head raised now.

"Was he infected?" Rose asked, hoping to understand his audacity, I supposed.

"I am infected, and still I do not serve it," Edward said, and I am amazed at the venom in his tone. I thought he'd be more readily forgiving, but then, I have never seen him in such a role.

"You cannot compare him to you," Kate yelled. "It was something we've never known, more powerful…I wanted him." She rises to her knees now. Irina is screaming, and her sisters fight to restrain her. "Yes," Kate yells, madly, I wanted him with such a power. His flesh called to me. Each morning…I waited to see him, waited to touch myself as I lusted over his powerful frame, his beauty. My old name called to his. He was my mate, not yours. Not yours," she is screaming this to Irina. "Damn you, damn you, damn you…" She lowers slowly back to the floor where she lays sobbing, "Damn you all."

Irina screams and writhes in her sisters' arms, "I will kill you! I will rip your head off and chew on your bones, I will purge your songs from the memories of my brothers and sisters and all who remember this day will spit on the earth and curse your name."

Edward stood slowly. I stood as well, though I withdrew my hand, for I did not understand what all of this meant, and in his shoulder I felt a hardening that made my heart quicken.

"Irina. Be still," he commanded.

Irina swallowed, panting, but she slumped in her sisters' arms as though all the fight had drained from her.

"Stand, Kate," Edward said.

Others helped Kate onto her feet, and brought her closer to Edward, though not too close as Irina stiffened again thinking they'd draw too near.

Kate pulled away from those who had helped her. "You have always been the arrogant fool," she addressed Edward. "Now you think to rule me here as you did there when our mother's smile was the sun meant only for you."

"Your tongue has split," Edward said with disgust.

"I knew you would say it."

"Yes, Foresight. That's what we said about you all those eons. 'She sees the future.'" He had mocked this last sentence.

"It was not foresight. It was intelligence. And still it is. So easy to look intuitive around the dull-witted," she sneered.

"So we are attacked from within, and you are yielded to him oh Intelligent One?"

"I am not yielded. I am in love. I am human…unlike you who shall remain nothing—not favored, not human, not alive…and not brave enough to die." She spat on the floor and glared at him.

"You claim humanity, sister. Well they have laws as well, and you have violated them."

"And you are better? Murderer. Do you think I don't see the guilt? We share the stories. Do you think we should overlook everything, as if we are there and not here? Even there you sought to hold the standard you judged us by. Here you are just obnoxious."

"I never claimed to be your judge. And yet you have put me in that place yet again. So I will judge, and you will not like it. You have betrayed your sister. You have betrayed us all with your whoring."

Kate raised her head and growled. "She is not my keeper. She is not my sister. We are all orphans here. I do not recognize you as my lord."

"I do not recognize you as my sister. But I have seen your kind. Betrayal is ancient amongst the fallen."

"You call me fallen? Then what are you? You take up with that?" She pointed to me, "And what shall come of it? What shall your offspring be? We have no ability to reproduce. Not even here. We are a sterile race. We must choose this battle, unlike those who are born into this hellish place. We must fight our way in with full knowledge, like the perversions we are. Yet you, you the favored son, will instigate a new breed. A new race. You, once again, are the great hope. You didn't come to serve, you came to be worshipped, as usual. Hallelujah. Your precious seed shall save us all. Goodie, goodie. It took you long enough. Not too sturdy when left by your lonesome? Could it be you need the peons to get anything done? But let us not speak poorly of the bearer of the special seed that shall give this poor charred place its new beginning. I suppose that once we journey to our father, we shall spend the next cazillion years hearing, yet again, of your singular greatness, as if the rest of us are, as always, the chorus to your solitary performance."

"You tell it as it is." Edward says.

"And I am to deny myself love in this place? One consolation as I lead my pointless existence in your service yet again?"

"Have we not loved you?" I have never experienced the tone in his voice. He does not love her. Not now.

"I have lost my mother!" she yells, the madness in her eyes almost unbearable to look at. "And worse, I never had her. I see that now. If she loved me she would have never let me come here!"

"You speak as the fallen. You must acknowledge this breach. You are justifying this."

"I am lonely." Her truth is gut-wrenching to me. Yet Edward stands tall without emotion.

"Are you infected?" Rose interrupts, addressing Kate.

"No. I am human now. I denounce such a brother…such a family. I want someone. I want Garrett. I want his love. I took it. I enticed him. Seduced him."

Irina is screaming.

"If you won't repent, you have to go. We can't trust you if you won't acknowledge."

"Then I shall be alone in this place. They'll capture me and feed on me," Kate screams.

"And so they will," Edward says walking quickly to where she is. "So I ask you one more time, do you acknowledge the betrayal?"

"I will not." They stare at one another.

"Cast her out," he says.

Garrett struggles to life now. "No. Edward." He is too feeble to stand.

"You have no say," Edward says, harsh and unmoveable. I've never known him this way. What plan does he speak of? Am I a breeder of some sort? Who is he being now? He speaks as though his purpose is not love at all. Did he pick me for my naïveté? For my human hips that were so ready for him? Is this not love? Is he against it? Is love, to him, some low human behavior? I move around him and stand defensively before Kate.

"You can't do this to her. You can't cast her away. Caius will take from her. She'll know the agony you know. Where is your mercy? What gives you the right?"

There is a buzz in this room. They are not with me, they are with him. They are angry that I have spoken thus to him. They are ready to defend him.

And he stands with them.